CHICAGO � The woman in the blue suit striding briskly into the Sofitel Hotel near O'Hare airport looked like any other 50-something businesswoman on her mode to a meeting. And in a way she was, a marketing consultant and mercenary writer visiting from her hometown several hundred miles away.
But the woman flew to Chicago last Friday on a strangely hole-and-corner errand: a newspaper interview that she gave under an false name. Afterward, she checked into a hotel business district under a different fake identity.
Then she returned to her home in the woods on the Mississippi River, where she has tried, with only partial success, to carve out a peaceable existence afterwards more than a decennary of existence stalked by a former boyfriend.
The fair sex, writing under the nominate Kate Brennan, has published a book, "In His Sights: A True Story of Love and Obsession" (Harper, $24.95), one of the first full-length memoirs of a stalk victim. She describes a campaign of surveillance, break-ins, severed earpiece lines and creepy confrontations after her decision to leave "Paul," a charming but distant adventurer with serious relationship issues.
The stalk, which continues sporadically today, is at once outlandish, terrifying and, owing to Paul's inscrutable pockets, maddeningly relentless and difficult to trace, according to the book. It led the author to move 16 times in 16 months, she writes.
"It got to the detail with Paul," Brennan recalled while sitting on a pastel couch in the hotel anteroom, "where if my car and my house hadn't been tampered with and I hadn't gotten a threatening phone call and I'd been able to do my work, that was a good day."
Brennan, 58, a blunt, jaunty woman wHO comes across as nobody's idea of a dupe, said she hoped her memoir would help give voice to the one thousand thousand women and several one C thousand workforce who, according to government statistics, ar stalked each year in this country, usually by ex-lovers.
Her decisiveness, on the one bridge player, to possibly provoke her stalker by writing the book, merely on the other to preserve some privacy by giving herself and her stalker pseudonyms is, she acknowledges, severe to explain. It sure as shooting complicates how the rule book will be received in a publishing environment where the put-on memoir has become its own exploding subgenre.
Brennan aforesaid that one time she had determined to tell her story, adopting a nom de guerre "felt like the one thing I could do that had any possible action of minimizing the danger." Her rightful identity and that of Paul were revealed to The New York Times so that the paper could confirm the outlines of her case.
The Times reviewed police reports, confirmed biographical information about Brennan and Paul on the Internet and spoke by telephone to the late detective wHO handled Brennan's case. On meeting, Brennan showed the reporter a current passport issued under her real name. The photo matched, and stamps in the passport matched trips described in her book.
Brennan's sneak was never violent to her; he never even directly threatened to scathe her. But one of the more than disturbing truths to emerge in the book is that if you are determined to turn someone's world inverted, mess with her head and destruct any colour of ordering in her life, and if you have the money and connections to hire people to do it for you, at that place is not much that anyone, including the constabulary, can do to stop you, despite anti-stalking laws in every state.
Perhaps only a crazy person would do such a thing, but there are a lot of crazy people out on that point. And though stalkers have many different psychological profiles and motivations, psychologists and criminologists world Health Organization have studied them have found that most ar driven by a motivation to control others, to prove that they cannot be excised from a life with a simple Dear John.
Trouble from the start
Brennan, then a 41-year-old college writing teacher and Bronte learner in a biggish city in the Midwest (its real discover is not hard to guess from the book), met Paul, a freelance photographer, in 1991 at a party and was impressed by his worldliness.
A few weeks after they started dating, Paul's father, a affluent businessman, was brutally murdered. (In the interview, Brennan said she fictionalized some details of the murder to camouflage the identity of Paul's family and altered the physical descriptions of Paul and others, but non the events in the book.)
When Brennan's new swain grew more than erratic after the mangle, Brennan, world Health Organization grew up in an alcoholic household and was drawn, she writes, to unbalanced yet controlling manpower, chalked it up to the recent trauma.
"I kind of gave him a pass," she said. "I gave him a bunch of passes."
After a year, she stirred in with him. Paul's protestations of love grew louder even as his interest in Brennan waned. Former girlfriends floated in and out of his life, as did a network of ex-con friends, some of whom he introduced as computer hackers. After Paul started asking Brennan repeatedly if it scared her that he kept a gun in the house, she touched out. It was June 1994.
Paul called her over again and over again, begging her to come back. He drove by her house. He canceled her mail-forwarding order. Then, Brennan said, Paul stopped contacting her flat, and the more originative harassment began.
His friends called her to tell her where Paul had seen her the day before and that he was angry she had left. Her earpiece started sledding dead. Her 20-year account history with the sound company was deleted. Just before Brennan arrived to visit a brother at a summer house in Maine, Paul called the brother's unlisted number. A few days later, she was out hiking when a alien approached and said: "I've been observance you. You're alone now, aren't you?"
No matter how many times Brennan changed the locks, she writes, her apartment was entered and subtly rearranged. "I find a bar of soap from the second-floor bathroom on the third-floor kitchen counter," she writes. "A teaspoonful from a kitchen drawer lies on the middle of my bed."
Mark Wynn, a retired police lieutenant and a consultant on stalking world Health Organization advises the U.S. Justice Department, aforementioned micro-tampering in a victim's life is not unusual. "I've in reality worked cases as a police investigator where the offender would do similarly bizarre things," he said. "It's the constant behaviour that the offender wants the dupe to know, 'I'm here, and I can get to you.' "
After Paul bought the house across from Brennan's apartment, she went to the police. "They checked into things," she said, "just what they came up with was what I thought they would � which was what could be proven, which was, really, that he moved in across the street from me."
A detective suggested a restraining order, simply she was wary of confronting Paul in court.
When the police force brought Paul in for questioning, he denied harassing Brennan and said it was his wife's decisiveness � he had marital � to buy the house across from hers, according to the law report.
"He had every 'tell' of a guilty man," the investigator who took Brennan's first complaints and interviewed Paul said, speaking anonymously because it is against the policy of the detective's current way to mouth on the record. The detective said Paul was informed that if anything happened to Brennan, he would be a suspect. It was all the police could do.
Brennan touched. But no matter where she went, she says, the molestation continued for years � at her home, at her jobs.
Writing as empowerment
After she touched two geezerhood ago to a pocket-sized town where her home has deep roots, the harassment narrowing off. She decided to write her book. "There was a point at which I thought, 'This is the biggest story in my life right now, and if it were anything else, I would be writing a book about it. And am I going to give that to him, too?' 4% I decided no."
She chose to write anonymously, she said, because "I don't want to heighten the peril to me and/or mass close to me by forcing his hand." The Times did not endeavor to contact Paul, which was a condition on which Brennan volunteered his name; she hopes he will non learn of her book.
Brennan's editor at HarperCollins, Jennifer Barth, aforementioned that when she told the source her write up would stimulate to be vetted, Brennan offered constabulary and psychotherapist reports.
"She had the sense that the onus is on you to raise your account," Barth said.
In an age of James Frey and JT LeRoy and, most recently, Margaret Seltzer, whose memoir of growing up in Los Angeles gangs proved fictional (and was withdrawn by its publisher), Brennan slaked HarperCollins lawyers, Barth said. For the article, this reporter besides spoke to Brennan's clinical psychologist, who saw Brennan on and off for 15 years, by and large for kinship problems, she said. The therapist, whose name was provided on the condition it not be used, said there was "no chance" Brennan was inventing her story.
Last September, as Brennan was finishing her manuscript, her phone went dead once more. The military service technician, she said, told her the line had been cut and reattached to some other line. He could offer no explanation. Brennan was angry just not surprised: She false it was Paul or one of his agents.
"I don't have any expectation that I would of all time, in a legal way, that I would have any justice," she said. "That's non even in the region of what I call back will materialize in my life."
She aforementioned she did not require the harassment to get much worsened, nor did she expect it to get better.
"I think it's a game for him," she aforementioned. "Much more than fun to just mess with me and spoil my life in this way and constantly remind me I can't get rid of him, that he's got control over me."
Her hope, she said, is to outlive her stalker.
"The only if way that I'll know the stalking will stop," she said, "is if he's dead."
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